Wednesday, 17 September 2014

The Pathetic Fallacy – or you, me and the weather – Elizabeth Kay

I always had trouble with the phrase pathetic fallacy. It seemed like an extremely harsh condemnation of
the British obsession with The Weather, and a wagging finger at attributing any
sort of malevolence to it. We Brits all know The Weather has a particular
delight in ruining Wimbledon fortnight, bank holidays and test matches. So it
was with some surprise that I discovered the words have changed their meaning,
and when Ruskin first coined the phrase it didn’t mean stupid misconception but simply emotional falseness. What’s wrong
with the occasional foray into personification, if it’s deliberate? When I’m
writing a fantasy involving a desert it’s quite nice to have a callous sun with
a definite mind of its own. Writing has fashions, and the fact that a Greek
chorus is as yesterday as a codpiece shouldn’t stop you using one if you feel
that’s exactly what your story needs.

All that
was just a way of getting me into writing about the weather, of course. I’m
sitting here with the uncaring rain beating down outside, waiting for a
friendly and benevolent sun to show its smiling face so that I can get out into
the garden. But it’s The Weather that adds or subtracts colour from our
writing. Of course, if you’ve set something in a mine or a spaceship it isn’t
relevant, but even in a hospital a glimpse of a snowflake through a window can
bring a tear to the eye.

One of the
things I’ve always admired about C.S Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia was the way
he used different locations, with their differing weathers, to bump up the
atmosphere. The journey to Harfang in The
Silver Chair makes me shiver just thinking about that driving snow, and
crossing the desert in The Horse and His
Boy usually has me heading to the fridge for a cold drink. The storm at sea
on the Voyage of the Dawn Treader is
terrific stuff, and I tried something similar in Ice Feathers:

…The following afternoon the sky darkened to the colour of a
rotten tooth and the wind started to blow with serious intent one moment, only
to die away altogether the next. It was odd. The sails would be pulling hard
for a while; a moment later this furious activity would be followed by an eerie
period of quiet, as though the vessel were holding its breath. Then the boat
took to lurching to and fro in a very unpredictable way, and Kura had to fix
her eyes on the horizon to stop herself feeling ill.

The storm overtook them with
frightening speed this time round, and the waves just got bigger and bigger.
The deck became awash with foam, stranded fish, and splintered wood from
damaged crates. As if the deck weren’t wet enough already, the rain lashed at
it with real violence, and one of the water barrels broke free and rolled into
the mast with considerable force. The horizon vanished behind towering
cliff-faces of water, and the ship shuddered as it hit a gigantic wave full-on.

Getting sufficient intensity into a piece of work isn’t
easy, as the weather is such a common theme and finding new ways to describe it
is tricky. Even in a rain forest rain is still rain. It’s the effect it has on
the environment that’s the telling point – the effect the wind has on the
waves, and the effect the waves have on the boat. I’ve encountered two lots of
rain that I thought were particularly memorable. The first was in Costa Rica
(and what an inspiration that place was – it gave me the opening of The Divide).

I was sitting in a bar,
drinking a beer, and the glasses all came with little paper pads underneath
them, as the condensation was so extreme. The glasses cried dribbles of water
down the sides in a constant stream of misery, and the rain hammered on the
corrugated iron roof like an entire troupe of tap-dancers. The second time was
in Zambia, driving along in the back of an open-topped truck. The raindrops
hurtled down like bullets; they were the biggest raindrops I’ve ever seen, and
they actually hurt when they hit you. Really hurt – we were given a tarpaulin
to pull over us, as protection. It’s extremes like this that you remember.

Times
change, too. How do you describe a sunset these days, when so many have done it
before you and a photograph does it so well? Jane Austen’s use of the weather
was more about the effect it had on her characters; no photographs to grace the
covers of her novels in those days, and everyone was only too familiar with the
weather as most people were out and about in it far more than we are with our climate-controlled
cars and centrally-heated homes. In John Mullen’s excellent book What Matters in Jane Austen he says:

Sense and Sensibility is kicked
into life by a misjudgment about the weather: Marianne goes walking on the
Devon hills with her younger sister Margaret, convincing herself that "the
partial sunshine of a showery sky" bodes well. Marianne's
"declaration that the day would be lastingly fair" is utter folly,
revealed when "a driving rain set full in their face". Fleeing
for home, Marianne trips and is rescued by the handsome Willoughby. It might
seem a fortunate accident, the beginning of a romance, but Marianne's
determination to delude herself about the weather bodes ill.

So what next for the weather? It’s more extreme than it used
to be. Bad news for people living on a flood plain, or for those who rely on the
rain for their crops. For the writer, though, it’s out and about in the thick
of it. Hailstones, snowdrifts and mist are the clothes worn by our countryside;
make sure you’re up to date with the latest fashions on the catwalk.

4 comments:

I think the weather can make a huge difference to how we think and feel - ask any primary school teacher about trying to control a class during a high wind. But the best literary quote I came across was in Gabriel Garcia Marquez - 'it was raining too hard to think' - I know exactly what that's like!!

yes weather is vital to our moods and important for setting the scene in literature. the pathetic fallacy is also about how weather in lit seems to mirror or mock the protagonist's feelings or experiences and in fact in real life it often feels as if it does!